Catching Up

I've been a very bad blogger.........its been months since I posted anything, and lots of things have happened!! Where has the time gone??

Let's see........since my last post in April, we had another wet spring (and so far a wet summer too), and with all that rain came grass in abundance! The cows have all calved, the calves have been branded and vaccinated and all are turned out in the south quarter, there's so much grass they'll be there until fall!

In May a new fellow joined us from Maureen Elgert of MRE Farm at 100 Mile House, BC. Coal has been a joy to raise, he has exceeded every hope so far, and I am SO looking forward to starting him on stock! Coal is like an old soul in a puppy suit, its really hard to believe how good a pup he is......looking forward to some good stuff from this young man :o)

Coal and Shay relaxing on a rare warm day!
MRE's Knight Moves - "Coal"

In June our ASCA club hosted a 2 day stockdog clinic with Sharon Simmons and then 4 stock trials over 2 days, at SwedeLee Farm in Donalda, Alberta. The clinic and trials were hugely successful despite the torrential downpours that haunted one day of the clinic and both days of the trials! The winds were near hurricane force driving the rains sideways! The stores in town did a booming business in rain gear! Chili had an awesome weekend, earning ALL her Open titles (cattle, sheep & ducks) on Saturday, leaving Sunday for us to relax and enjoy the trials.

July came and I am so happy to say that I found a really good young ram for my ewes! I have been working on upgrading my small flock of sheep from my collection of "mutt" sheep that I use to train my dogs on, to what I hope will be a good flock of registered Katahdin's. I expect I will always have some Barbados ewes as they offer a very different challenge for the dogs, and besides I really like my Barbs :o) But I wanted to add some good Katahdin's for meat production and with any luck I'll be able to raise some excellent breeding ewes as well. When I purchased my ram lamb, I was lucky enough to also be able to buy a really nice 2 yr old ewe to add to my flock. (pictured above is the young ram, and beautiful dark red ewe) I'm so looking forward to lambing season next spring, its been a *long* time since I've raised lambs! My ram and ewe came from Averys Katahdin's, www.averyshairsheep.blogspot.com - thank you Dee for the opportunity to acquire such quality animals!

Chili Sorting Heifers

This is a little short video of Chili that Lill took, while we were sorting some heifers thru a gate. This was the first time that Chili had done any real work for about 4 months....winter was just to brutal this year to do much of anything, so only the necessary things got done. I was really pleased with her, considering she was in near standing heat!

http://youtu.be/p5IAEebdJT0

We took a few video clips of Lill's dog Tray as well......you can find them on YouTube on my channel at 1234jholmes

enjoy!

Lots Goin' On

Wow...its been a while since I posted! I think I went into a hole somewhere, the late winter/early spring weather really got to me! The sun finally came out, actually the better part of April has been pretty decent, not very warm, but at least its warming up now and the snow has all but gone! I even see some bits of green starting to happen :o) The calves started arriving about a month ago and we're 2/3 done now. I love seeing spring calves :o)

Something else exciting happened......PJ our filly finally went to be started! She is at our neighbors ranch, and Cody has, in a very short period of time (less than 10 days) given her a very promising start as a good ranch horse! He's been moving pairs with her every day, and although I'm sure it doesn't feel like it to Cody, she LOOKS like a seasoned ranch horse already! I"m really looking forward to some good things from her.

On Good Friday I went north to my friend Lill Roth-Lee's farm, for a couple of hours of working dogs with Lill. It was sooo good to go and have some fun and laughs with Lill! We were dog breaking the heifers that we'll use for our clinic and trial in June. I'll add a short video of Chili in my next blog... helping me sort heifers

Grumble Grumble - Bitch bitch

SUCCESS!!
Well....I have just about had enough of winter, and the whole of next week looks like its going to be more of the same! To make matters worse, the power went off at 9:00am this morning just as I was sitting down with my cereal and a hot cup of coffee. This is a very rare occurance here, and I expected it to come right back on.....nuh uh, it took a good 3 hours before it came back on and in the mean time, to add insult to injury a strong south wind blew in. This combined with some rediculously cold temps equaled 2 frozen waterbowls and 40 cows plus 16 heifers and a couple of bulls that thought their world would come to an end if they didn't get a drink RIGHT NOW. Luckily it was only the top float assembly on both bowls that had frozen, they hadn't been without power long enough for the freezing to keep going south. Kya came with me and while I worked on the waterbowl, she gathered cows and pushed them back out to the field.....much nicer than having cattle breathing down your neck while you're trying to operate a wrench :o)

Completed Project

Jaime....not real happy with this turn of events ! :)

Well here it is......my grooming table is complete! I've wanted a grooming table for a long time, just because it makes it so much easier on a persons back rather than bending over to groom dogs, or find an available "something" to put them up on. This design is from my friend Pat who owns two grooming shops and it works really well, its nice to have a shelf underneath the table to keep your tools handy! My dogs are pretty sure I've lost my mind, and are not very enthusiastic about this new addition to their routines, but with regular use I'm sure they'll learn to live with it :o)

Happy Birthday Old Man

Yesterday Hawk turned 11 years old! I ran out of time yesterday and didn't get it posted.......and didn't even manage to get a new picture of him, so I'll post ones that are from his youth! He really doesn't look or act any differently now, except he's a little grayer in the face. Still a goofball tho :o)

Happy birthday old man we love ya :o)

Done!

My website has at long last been updated! Thanks to Cherie Corrigan of Dream in Design web services! I hope now with Cherie's help to be able to update my website on a little more frequent basis. One day I'd also like to learn how to develop and look after my site myself. Thats one of those "roundtuit" projects tho, and it might be a while!